Conventional olive slicing machines employ rotating knives to slice olives positioned in pockets on a drum. In such machines, the olive-containing pockets are translated past a set of parallel knives as the drum rotates about a shaft. Each olive is preferably aligned with its longitudinal axis perpendicular to the knife edges during the slicing operation.
To slice olives or other fruit (or more generally, any articles) using a conventional slicing machine, the articles to be sliced must be loaded onto the machine. Unfortunately, in order to load the articles efficiently, their orientations are typically randomized. Thus, the articles are either sliced with random orientation or must be aligned prior to slicing.
Techniques have been developed for orienting generally spherical articles (such as fruit) having indentations (such as the indented area surrounding a fruit stem) and which are positioned in cups, while the cups are translated to a processing station. For example, a stationary, elongated rod has been positioned in the path of one or more translating cups, each containing a piece of fruit to be sliced. In a conventional system including such a rod, the rod is positioned just above the bottom of the cups so that the rod bumps the fruit as the cups translate past the rod until the fruit rotates into a desired orientation. In such desired orientation, the indented area of the fruit aligns with the rod. In the desired orientation, the fruit preferably rests on the cup bottom and the rod exerts no force on the fruit, so that the fruit will remain in the desired orientation for subsequent processing.
It has not been known until the present invention how to align elongated, generally rotationally symmetric articles (for example, olives and some other fruit), which may or may not have an indented surface region, in an accurate and convenient manner. In particular, it has not been known how to align (or orient) olives, both accurately and conveniently, for subsequent slicing by knives.